‘We are radical, we are in love with this planet and we are acting in fierce love for our future.’

Rebel yell: Arne Springorum on XR in the Czech Republic, and why all Friends everywhere should act

In the autumn of 2018 I read Elisabeth Hering’s book about early Friends, their determination and suffering that led after a decades-long struggle to the achievement of the Act of Toleration. Those same weeks I was also deeply moved upon reading the obituary of a US Friend and Quaker from my first Meeting who went to prison as a conscientious objector during world war two. I distinctly remember saying to myself, ‘You are a Quaker, what will you go to prison for, what truth to power will you speak?’

Apparently, it was all meant to be: about two weeks later another Friend from Italy sent me a Facebook Messenger link to Extinction Rebellion (XR). I ignored it. The next day he sent me a Guardian article about XR. I ignored it. On day three (!) he sent me another link about XR asking me if I had checked this out.

Arne! I clicked on the link and spent the next three hours reading on the internet everything I could find about XR (at that time still possible in three hours), then joined and became a Rebel for Life. It was November 17, 2018, the day Extinction Rebellion simultaneously occupied five London bridges and experienced their first mass arrests to help humanity understand the severity of the climate and ecological catastrophe we are in.

We started the Czech Extinction Rebellion two weeks later in the Prague Quaker Center. Quakers financed the rebellion’s first web page here and provided regular meeting space. Our Declaration of Rebellion to the Czech government followed on December 14. That was the Friday after which Greta Thunberg , speaking from the COP in Katowice, Poland, had asked the world to do something as they were ‘just talking’ again in Katowice. We got fined for not having announced our six-person protest five days in advance. We took the fine with pride and the case is still in the courts as I refuse to admit guilt in holding an unlawful protest assembly.

Many civic offences have followed in the twenty months since – usually for not obeying police orders to leave a scene. Twice I have chalk-sprayed* a ministry building. Twice the potential criminal offence was dropped as the ministry chose not to create additional publicity by pressing charges.

We have grown to several hundred rebels. We have organised picnics at the Prague castle, demanding that the President comes and speaks about the climate with us and got arrested for overstaying the official visiting hours. We blocked the city highway last October with 150 rebels, all of whom were arrested – to little media coverage as Karel Gott, the singer, was laid to rest the same day and took up all media space.

We have suffered through the Corona crisis and lockdown, trying to create an online rebellion and seeing many rebels drift off. It’s been a tough year for Czech XR rebels. Yet the climate situation is getting only worse by the day. They now say that our planet warms at a rate of five nuclear bombs every second. July had the record lowest sea ice extent in the arctic, Greenland has moved beyond its melting tipping point, and Czech forests are dying in front of our eyes as we struggle through a seven-year drought, which I know as a geologist will have no end. I believe in science, I believe in physics and I believe in our power to achieve change and lessen the lethal impacts the climate catastrophe will have on our lives and those of our children and future generations. Our global failure to engage in a meaningful and effective way with this crisis is unprecedented.

I do understand the psychology of it. I had understood the threat in 1989 in a lecture I had given about the ‘greenhouse effect’, which is what we called it then. And I then followed everyone else’s example and put my head deep into the sand, read Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth in 2006 and stuck my head even deeper. I read in 2010 about climate tipping points, went through two weeks of grief, and then put my head in even deeper. What could I do, a single human soul against a global economic system and civilisation hell-bent on self-destruction?

The power of emotional communication put an abrupt end to that when I saw Britons my age getting arrested in London for peacefully protesting the government’s criminal inactivity to effectively address climate change.

Knowing the science is not enough, we all know it. You need to know it in your hearts, too. You need to admit that truth to your inner vulnerable self and cry out in pain for the injustice you have been part of, even aware of.

That is why XR says hope dies and action begins. We are radical, we are in love with this planet and its life and we are acting in this fierce love for our future. We are fully aware that we stand to lose very little now as we are guaranteed to lose so incredibly much more if we remain silent with the majority.

Roger Hallam has recently published a video where he speaks about the acts of prophets. Prophets acted free from what society would think of them. They acted and spoke based on what they felt God had told them to do or say – regardless of the consequences and free of society’s scorn. You act because you have to, if you want to be able to look at yourself in the mirror.

Friends, this sounds brave and grandiose. But the reality is full of doubt, misery and exhaustion. Full of the gnawing feeling of not spending enough time with my wife and children (true), of not being able to focus on my work as an energy efficiency consultant (true), of being active and ineffective and exhausted from it and having achieved close to nothing (also true).

I sit in our Quaker Meetings and my mind goes blank – no thoughts, no ministry comes to me. Just silence. I focus on not thinking about the Rebellion, on not thinking about the next act of civil disobedience, on not criticising myself for once for not being radical enough to trigger societal change, or of being too radical, which puts off other people from joining the movement – where is the truth? The truth is I am scared. I am afraid of being alone. I am terrified of heeding the call for being a prophet and acting based on that call, free of what other people think and might do.

Friends, I am exhausted. I spent the last three days constantly on the verge of crying, first in a conversation with the police about our Big Rebellion next week, then in a Zoom call with a client where I could not concentrate. I finally admitted my poor state to a colleague and let go and cried. Yesterday I went to the Prague psychiatric emergency ward and was relieved to learn that I show no signs of being depressed but all signs of acute emotional exhaustion. I slept well and long last night. This afternoon I got arrested again, almost spontaneously, unplanned, during an XR action where I was the police liaison. When an officer warned me that, if I overstepped that line, he would arrest me, I said, let me think about it and in an instant knew what I wanted to do.

We are at the beginning, our actions are cute and creative and to a large degree harmless. They hardly make the news in the Czech Republic of 2020. But what did I expect? To get arrested a few times and – bingo – system change is here?

We know the science, and this time I mean the social science. Mass civil disobedience means radical but respectful breaking of the law, for days on end with large amounts of ordinary people of all ages.

Friends, we need you. The world needs you. Get up from your century-old Quaker benches, stop relishing in Quaker history, of those that have gone before us so that we could witness in silence in our Quaker way how the world, our species and many with it, goes to shambles (at best) or extinct (quite possibly). I beg you, to stand up, to not stand by. We need Friends for their peacefulness, for their non-violence, for their wisdom, for their ability to act like prophets and to listen to God, for their integrity and their commitment and most of all for their love for this world. 

We have played big before. When we were part of the abolishment of the slave trade, when we stood up and were arrested for freedom of religion, when we supported the Underground Railway, when we financed the Kindertransport and provided host families for hundreds of Jewish children to be saved from the Holocaust. If you have ever proudly said that Quakers have been involved in the founding of great organisations such as Greenpeace or Amnesty International, be aware that you well might say this about Extinction Rebellion in the future. But so much more importantly, don’t just say so, as I did in the past, but please get involved. Get organising. We have done it before. Quakers started planning in 1942 for their involvement in post-War relief work in Germany. They poured enormous amounts of their own funds and organising skills into this effort. Can we mobilise again? Can we get to work and live our testimonies fully in a time where the world needs them out there, visibly for others to follow?

Friends, I know I am exhausted. But I wanted to write this to you and share this with you. Forgive me if I upset some of you, I don’t mean to be disrespectful.

But I do want a future for me and my children and for yours, too. And I do believe the social science that says that mass civil disobedience is the most effective tool for societal change. If at all you can, step up and offer your service, I know you can as we have done this before.

Finally, I long for rest and for hope. At this point I have very little. Yours, in love and rage. 

* Chalk spray causes no damage to buildings and washes off in the rain.

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Comments

Deep love and rage from one Quaker Rebel to another. I feel all you feel. Thank you for writing this call to rebel for life.

By suehampton@btinternet.com on 29th October 2020 - 11:31

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